Written in the Margins: Zuzanna Ginczanka's Poetry in English Translation - a webinar recording

Watch the recording of the webinar with a poet Mira Rosenthal, Ph.D., and a historian Anna Muller, Ph.D. in which they present their collaborative project that intertwines translations of poems by interwar Polish-Jewish author Zuzanna Ginczanka with historical narrative and personal reckoning to navigate the questions inherent in presenting a Holocaust author today.
An interwar poet of Jewish heritage, Ginczanka (1917-1944) was a sensation in the 1930s and gained acclaim in a Warsaw literary milieu dominated by men. With her early death at the hands of Nazis during WWII, her work fell into obscurity until the last decade, when a wave of renewed interest led to numerous books and exhibitions about her in Poland and across Europe. Though she published only one full-length collection during her lifetime, her Collected Poemsreaches over 300 pages and conveys the distinctiveness of her voice-a voice cut short in its prime. Critics often note the sensuality, androgynous motifs, and lyricism of her early poems, which became increasingly marked by satire. Such themes arise, in part, from the "double bind" she experienced being admired but also exoticized for her Semitic beauty during a time period when fascism was taking root in Europe.
Placed into context to reveal tensions of gender and race, and the time period's mounting political conflict lurking under the surface, Ginczanka's work proves to be insightful and even revelatory. Her prescient warnings about the nature of fascism deserve attention in the English-speaking world, where fascism and authoritarianism, misogyny and gender, ethnicity and race are still very much part of our public discourse.
The webinar was presented as part of the Tadeusz Solowij Lectures of the Kosciuszko Foundation.

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Thanks for sharing these wonderful conversations with us. I am new to Ginczanka's world. Her poems are stunning ❤